


Two Truths and a Lie

by kitsune13tamlin



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Knights - Freeform, Original work - Freeform, and bunnies (oh my!), and pick up trucks, and witches
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-24
Updated: 2019-04-24
Packaged: 2020-01-31 06:05:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18585319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kitsune13tamlin/pseuds/kitsune13tamlin
Summary: "I'm dying," the knight told her.  "That's what doctors are for," answered the witch.  What's strong enough to kill a heart?  You'd be surprised how small it can be.  And how necessary.





	Two Truths and a Lie

 

The knight rode up to her little wooden gate just as the periwinkles were starting to turn their faces to the fickle spring sunshine.  Sibil, on her knees amide bags of bone meal and blood meal and fancy cow manure, looked up from where she was transferring winter plants from their pots to their new homes in her flower bed, and saw him, all light and plaid and tousled, as he stepped out of his pick up truck and she watched as he came across the dirt and gravel drive to stand on the other side of her gate looking over it at her.  Tall, she thought.  He’s one of those tall ones.

He was also one of those straight-forward ones because he tipped his hat to her but he got straight to the point too.

“I heard you were a witch.”

She sat back a bit, resting her dirty gardening gloves on her equally dirty jean thighs, little plastic claws on the ends of the gloves unhooking dirt and bone meal across the denim.

“I am.”

He nodded.  Pulled in a breath and she wondered how this was going to go, which story was going to weave itself into being between them.  And then his smile was a little embarrassed and a little apologetic and he simply said:

“Good.  Because I think I’m dying.”

That was a new start and she gave it time to settle, looking at him.  He didn’t look sickly.  He looked tanned and weathered and she picked out some scars that looked old and healed, not young anymore but not old enough yet either.

“That’s what doctors are for,” she told him gently and didn’t say which side of helping with dying they were supposed to be on.  He shook his head, just a barely there move and she watched his lips shift again.  This time the smile was a little hard and a little frustrated.  His smiles were for him she realized.  Not her.  He wasn’t frustrated at her.  He was frustrated at himself.  A knight that couldn’t fight something he knew he should.

“Doc can’t help this.”  He hit a wall verbally but Sibil had all day long to plant and she waited patiently.  After a minute, he inhaled and then exhaled it hard through his nose.  Said:

“I’m dying of a broken heart.”

Witches weren’t supposed to be opinionated but Sibil’s eyebrows still shot up a bit at his confession.  Not because it wasn’t possible.  Even animals could die of a broken heart and while humans were made of more complex stuff, it still wasn’t unnatural for someone to die, usually slow and quiet, over a heart that was broken.  Her first impression of him had just been… She looked at him again, really looked this time with more than just her mortal eyes and he stood still in front of her as if he knew.  Maybe he did.  Knights were tricky like that.

Her second look told her that he had lines around his eyes that weren’t just from the sun and smiling.  That the very edges of his mobile lips were grey, right where they creased into his tanned skin.  She saw shadows in the whites of his eyes, past the piebald hazel color.  His hands, large, weathered and built for war - or work - hung just a little too slack at his sides, the fingers drained of their natural strength.  When she looked back at his eyes a second time, they looked back at her and they knew she’d seen.  She exhaled silently and finally stood up, setting aside the pot of dandelions, making sure to put it on the loose plastic of a fertilizer bag or else by the time she came back they’d already have put roots down into the soil and started making themselves at home wherever she set them.  She dusted off her gloves with a little rattle of plastic claws against each other and peeled them off, patting down her pants.

“Come inside,” she said.  “This is going to take a bit.”

As witches houses went, Sibil’s wasn’t very impressive.  It was just a cute little double wide trailer, with cheerfully painted sunrise sky siding and a white fake plastic cross-hatch fence that pretended to hide the foundation.  The stairs gave good solid thumps as she walked up them though onto the small porch where she did most of her work for people and the screen door gave its welcoming little creak as she pulled it open and he held it for her as she went through.  He thumped his work boots on the outside welcome mat and she thought a little better of him for it.  His hat came off when he came in too and she silently approved of the way he’d been raised and liked him even more.  Inside, Jasper, her familiar, stuck his head out from behind the easy chair, saw she had guests, thumped to show his disapproval of strangers and disappeared back behind the chair with a flick of his short tail.  Jasper didn’t like strangers.  But more, he knew if he threw a huff, she’d give him extra oats in his treat dish to apologize later on.  He was no dumb bunny.

“Have a seat,” she gestured to the dining room table, headed for the fridge.  “I’ve got soda, sun tea and water.”

“Sun tea, please,” he settled into one of the wicker chairs and it fretted a little under his weight, weaving not quite what it had once been thanks to Jaspar’s teeth.  It held just fine though and she gave the knight time to look around the living area of her trailer and realize there were no hanging crystals or dried herbs or skulls with candles on them and then she came back with two glasses of ice cubes and sun tea and a sugar dish shaped like a fish with a tourist trap attraction name painted along the side of it.  He smiled, something that said he was starting to relax, now that the hard part of admitting to a weakness inside himself was over and thanked her for the tea, waiting for her to take her first sip before he took his, strange equal parts manners and a soldier’s caution.  She spooned sugar into her tea and took her sip so he could too and then she let them both relax with the slow sound of ice in a glass and sunlight in their mouths and throats.  Outside a mockbird burst into a stolen song and the breeze brought it in through the open screened windows.  She watched the knight’s shoulders relax a little bit more.  Jaspar stuck his head out from behind the arm chair to judge them both with his tiny frowning face.

“It’s not a girl,” the knight said finally and she looked at him over the empty glass in her hand before standing up to refill both of their glasses with more tea.  He waited until she sat back down.  “And its not my leg.”

A lot of men broke their hearts over women.  Same way a lot of women broke their hearts over men.  Knights could, they were a devoted type, but more often if their heart broke enough to kill them it was over something else.  Knights tended to ‘big picture’ things beyond themselves.  So she was a little surprised but not largely so that it wasn’t over a woman.  

“Your leg?” she asked though, completely mystified by that and he swung his leg out from under the table to lean down and rap his knuckles on the calf of it.  Under the denim of his jeans something clipped back sharp and hollow.  Across the room, Jaspar’s little head bobbed.

“Lost it in my last tour overseas.  Lost my dog with it too.”

“oh.”

Not every knight went into the military.  There were plenty of dragons to fight right here that didn’t need going hunting for.  But quite a few of them, when they were young, did end up signing up.  It was in them to fight and, when they were young, having someone tell them where seemed like a good way to fulfill their need for training as well as their need to have a clear goal.  Knights didn’t do well without a clear goal and it could take some time to find it for yourself if you went it alone.

“I’m sorry.”

“Me too,” he said and didn’t say anything more.  She watched him tuck his leg back under the table and finally asked:

“So what did break your heart?”

His eyes looked up at her and that crooked smile that was for himself slid back over his lips.

“If I knew, maybe I could fix it on my own.  I just - woke up one day and it was broken.  I haven’t been able to put it back together.  And its killing me.”

She held out her hands, resting them on the table, palm up, half cupped.  

“May I see it?”

He hesitated.  He hesitated even though he’d come all this way to ask for her help, knowing she’d have to look inside of him, at his weaknesses and his personal intimate pain.  He was a knight and their armor held their hearts protected from outside as much as it protected the rest of them.  She wasn’t asking him for an easy thing - but he’d known she wouldn’t when he decided to come.  To his credit, he didn’t hesitate long.

“Yeah,” he pushed his glass to the side and reached out to rest his hands over hers.  Hers disappeared under the cup of both of his.  Jaspar hopped across the room and up onto the chair next to her at the table, recognizing something magic in the air and both too nosey, and too good at helping, to stay away.  Sibil raised her fingers enough to press them into the callouses and skin of his palms and wrists, anchoring herself and him together.

“Just close your eyes.  You don’t have to do anything.  This shouldn’t hurt but you may end up with some aftereffects once its done.”

“What kind?” he asked and didn’t take his hands back from her.  She gave him a smile.

“Mostly people talk about having dreams about being back in high school, naked and trying to find their locker or take a test they didn’t prepare for.  It usually wears off in a few days.  You’ll probably feel more emotional and vulnerable for a few days too.  Comes of having your heart outside your body.  Some people get cold.”

He shot her a look and there was no smile on his lips but the glance from his eyes was for her for a change and it looked old and dryly humorous and relieved.

“Think I can handle a few pantless dreams.”

“I think you can too,” she agreed with a smile for him and pressed her fingers up, just a bit, in place of a hand squeeze.  “Now shut your eyes and listen to the bees outside the window.  You can tell me what they’ve been saying once I’m done.”

The exhale he gave was a smile then and he leaned back a little into his seat, shoulders falling back as he tipped his head and shut his eyes.  Jaspar hunkered down in his chair, going into loaf form, ears relaxed back against his head.  Sibil shut her eyes and reached out into the empty space between their hands and called out his heart.

It came fairly easily.  He was apparently generous enough with it that it was always fairly close to the surface and she suspected, if it hadn’t been broken, it would have drawn out even easier.  She could feel the weight of it in her palms, heavy and warm.  Wet.  Physical hearts and metaphysical hearts weren’t all that different in practice.  Turning her head a little, she opened her eyes behind her closed eyes and looked just to the side of where his heart would be.  Out of the corner of her vision, as long as she didn’t concentrate on it, she could see the broken shell of his heart, hovering over their joined hands in the air, like crystal holding the sunlight.  And there was a lot of sunlight.

Hearts were funny things.  Unlike the rest of the organs in the body, they slowly turned into Frankenstien’s monsters over a person’s life and his was already a veritable patchwork.  She could see pieces of heart that had once belonged to his mother, his father.  A large part of his heart had originally been a brother’s heart, now his, filling in a hole where, she assumed, he’d given his own heart away to that same brother.  Those were healthy, living parts of his heart.  She saw little parts of animal heart as well, several cats, a few hamsters, what had probably been a cow’s.  

She saw what a large part of his heart was a dog’s and could almost trace the shrapnel scars on it.  Still beating, fierce and protective and determined, because it had been joyously given and death didn’t take away or kill a shared heart.  

She saw places where he was missing chunks of his heart, pieces he’d given away and had never had anything reciprocated over.  But that was normal too.  Not every heart piece given away was a heart piece traded and most of the holes in his heart like that were healthy, love he’d freely given away with no expectation of return.  A few were dark and dead around the edges - waiting still for a reciprocation that had never come but most of those were old and as healed as they could become.  There were places where other pieces of heart had attached to his, given love that had never been returned and those were normal as well.  Love wasn’t owed and there were plenty of times someone loved you without you knowing who they even were.  A good deed, a helping hand without thought, a kind word or touch and a piece of their heart broke off to follow you all your life without pain or hurt to either one of you, helping in return for a long ago help.  He didn’t, she could see, the deeper she looked as her vision drifted and his heart came into sharper focus, really have much of his original heart left at all.  Though, in essence, the heart he now had __was__  entirely his heart and his alone and when pieces of it were given away they would be entirely him without taking away from the gifted hearts grafted to his.  All in all she thought he had a beautiful heart and one of the biggest she’d ever seen.  In her palms, it pulsed warm and open and alive.

And broken.

It took her a while to notice that part, even though it was what she’d gone looking for in the first place.  Because the heart in her hands _ _was__  so alive and so large and so full of a thousand other hearts all working to keep it strong and steady and alive.  It had wounds in it, more than most but not the worst she’d ever seen.  Wounds were normal though and all of his were either in a state of healing or at least not starting to rot.  Some of them did go very deep, deep enough that she mistook some of them for the break at first.  But once she found the real break she couldn’t imagine she’d ever thought the wounds were the same.

It had started off as something small, some seed that had found ground and burrowed deep to the center of him.  She could almost make out the original shape, something from childhood, some great hurt that had changed the way he had trusted life and the world from that point onward.  But it had only been a start, a very small crack and hearts were resilient.  But there had been other seeds and because of the first one, these had found openings to burrow into as well.  Slowly, over time, they too had put out fissures through him, like thin roots, never enough by themselves to be more than minor damage but over time more seeds had found their homes and put out their fissure roots and slowly the fissures had started to find each other.  And where the fissures found each other, they had joined together to crack parts of him even wide apart.  In fact, once she was looking for those hair thin cracks, she could see that they were everywhere and that a great many of them had been there for years, each year spreading just a tiny bit further.  Each year finding a different reaching fissure and linking to it.  She sent light down through the fissures and suddenly his entire heart was illuminated.

Because his heart wasn’t broken

It was entirely shattered.

It caught her breath in her throat so sharply that she lost her concentration, __looked__  directly at the heart instead of sideways at it and the second she did it vanished from her sight entirely.  In her palms, she could still feel it, alive and pulsing and heavy but it was invisible again.  With a long slow sigh, she slowly let go of it all, feeling it fade away in her hands, feeling her mind drift back from the dark inside her until she could open her human eyes and see nothing but a lazy spring afternoon trickling in her windows, a little black rabbit laying patiently next to her and a man who looked like he was on the edge of taking a full on nap across the table.

Slow she slipped her hands out from under his and he was relaxed enough that it didn’t upset him entirely awake.  All but dozing his face looked peaceful and so much younger than she had first taken him for, still weathered, still worn but not as heavy with carried weight as it was when he was fully awake.  It made her own heart hurt and she recognized that she’d just given a piece of it away to him, that she cared for him now that she’d seen his true heart and wanted to help someone with a heart like his.  With a silent sigh at herself she reached down to stroke a hand over Jaspar’s soft fur, recentering and focusing herself in the present, the mundane, the mortal again.  The afternoon slid slow into evening dusk and the man across the table finally stirred, lifted his chin from where it had fallen to rest against his chest and opened hazy eyes, blinking, to reorient himself to where he was.  Sibil watched the weight slowly seep back into his face, his shoulders, his hands, but it didn’t lay as brick thick as it had before.  He blinked at her in the light from outside and inhaled deeper, as if he hadn’t been able to fill his lung completely in quite some time and smiled a bit wryly at himself, still a little hazy.

“No naked dreams,” he murmured.  She hummed her laugh as she stood up and finally turned on a light.  Jaspar hopped off his chair with a thump and disappeared under the nearby couch.  Letting the stiffness work out of her as she moved, Sibil took the few steps that took her into her kitchen and first set down a bowl of pellets for Jaspar near the couch and then started taking tupperware out of her refrigerator, setting it on the table with a couple of forks and spoons and setting the kettle to warm water for tea.  The knight watched her for a while, letting her movements anchor him back in this reality and then he finally asked:

“Can I help?”

It wasn’t the question she’d been expecting but after he said it she knew it should have been.  She gave him a smile and set a plastic bowl of potato salad in front of him, pulling back the plastic wrap over its top.

“Not yet.  But soon,” and they both knew she meant more than with food.  

Though to be fair she would expect help with the dishes afterward.

Finally, when the cold fried chicken, left over mac and cheese, bowls of pre-prepared salad and potato side were ready and she’d made them both mugs of tea, she settled down across the table from him.  He watched silently as she said grace over the meal.  Witch or not, her mama had raised her right and would have come back from, well not her grave but certainly from her retirement condo in Florida, to smack her knuckles if she’d ever forgotten.  He dug in afterward though and for a long time there was only the sound of silverware and dishes and the occasional thump under the couch from Jaspar as they all ate.  Heart spelunking was hungry work and witching burned a lot of calories.  Finally, once the eating had started to slow down to lazy levels, Sibil answered what he wasn’t asking.   

“I found the hurt in you.  Its not just one thing.  From what I can see it looks like you’ve taken a lot of hurts that never healed over the years and they’ve changed you each time at a very core level.  Not the usual hurts either.  Not a romantic break up or a lost dream or anything like that.  These are things that took root and didn’t heal so much as grow.  And - you don’t look surprised by what I”m telling you.”

“No.  Sorry,” he shook his head, apologizing for not reacting properly over not being surprised.  He paused and she let him debate how much he wanted to tell her that was private.  But she’d already peered into his heart and he seemed to decide fairly quickly that trying to hide things wasn’t worth it.  He met her eyes.

“Look - “ he paused again but it was more trying to find the path in over hesitating taking it now that he’d made his decision to trust her.  “The first one was from when I was young, wasn’t it?  Can you tell that?” at her nod, he nodded back.  Looked down to fish a bit more salad onto his fork but didn’t put it in his mouth.  His heavy brows twitched.

“That would be my sister then.  Maybell.  She died before she was born.  I had been so excited that I was going to get to be a big brother, that I was going to get a little sister to love.  I wanted her more than anything, pestered my mom all the time to get to rest my ear against her stomach and talk to May about all the things we’d do when she was born.  Except mama had a miscarriage, went into labor.  May came out too soon.  Never even drew a first breath.  She was perfect though.  Perfectly formed and so tiny.  They let me see her after they cleaned her up.  She broke my heart, I think - but knowing that mom was hurting and that mom was worried about me hurting was even worse.  I might have only been a kid, but I knew how important it was to let yourself hurt, to let yourself cry, to let yourself do whatever it was you needed to do to deal with the pain so you could start to get better - or let the pain find its right place at least.  Mom wouldn’t do that - because of me.  Because she was worried that her doing that would hurt me. “  He paused, absently turned his fork, still not lifting the salad to his mouth.  Sibil waited but he didn’t start again.

“You changed who you were.  I could see it in your heart.”

His shoulder moved, not a shrug but almost one, as if he could shake off the assessment, or maybe the memory.  Maybe it was the weight of the memory he wanted to lose.  He looked down at his salad and then back up at her, meeting her eyes not because he wanted to, the hazel said, but because he wasn’t going to run from this fight, with himself, no more than he’d ever run from any other fight before.  

“I couldn’t mourn, couldn’t let myself feel through the pain, because that would have made it worse on mom.  So I - changed.  I changed who I was so that I would be less me and more what my mom needed.  Dad too.”  His shoulder moved again, restless to get rid of it.  “Sometimes you have to give up what you know you need for what someone else needs more.”

Sibil had to swallow.  Her throat felt tight.  She understood.  Sometimes you faked things about who you really were to make the people you loved more comfortable.  It was lie and sometimes it was a lie you ended up having to make a truth - but it was for love and some things, like love, could be more important than things like the truth.  Everyone did it to themselves in small ways, children most of all.  It was a self-inflicted wound, one you never got over but it was one that most people could live with the rare times they did it.  In a perfect world, it wouldn’t be necessary - but this wasn’t a perfect world.

She reached out, rested her hand on his that was still holding the fork - but she saw his eyes harden even if he still wouldn’t look away from her, too determined to stay honest with her.

“I’ve done it all my life.  I’ll do it again.  If taking that comfort of thinking I’m okay away from them is what it costs to heal my heart - then I’ll die.  I’m not dumping my pain onto what they’re already carrying and I’m not letting them carry the weight of feeling guilty for a decision I made myself.”

He was such a Knight in that moment.  She could all but see the glowing, dented and worn armor forming around him in her little kitchen, some kind of amalgam of Roman centurion and medieval European plate.  She very carefully squeezed the hand that was under hers.  And shook her own head.

“That’s not what’s killing you.”

He actually rocked back, just a little, in his chair, the wicker creaking as his weight shifted and the armor disappeared like someone throwing a switch on a porch light.  And then he was sitting forward again and setting down the fork in his bowl before turning his hand to curl around hers where it was still resting against him.  It was a warm, firm grip, one that told you, with a touch, that it would hold and never let go if that was what you needed.  Such a Knight, she thought with a quiet eddy of affection in her chest and she twinned her fingers back to hold him just as firmly.

“We all change ourselves.  Its our nature.  Hurting yourself for love is one of the most basic human traits.  If we do it right, the parts we change don’t hurt who we really are - or, if they do, we learn to still be ourselves past that, like a river running into a rock and going around it.  It will always leave wounds but - all hearts have wounds.  It might not be right - but its part of what is.  What’s killing you - is that no one has ever noticed.”

She watched his eyebrows come down and the look he gave her, for her and not himself, was bemused, lips curling upward at their edges, tinting his eyes.

“Of course not.  That’s the point.  If they noticed, than it wouldn’t have worked.”

It was her turn to tighten her hand around his.

“I know,” and she did.  But she also knew: “But every single time you changed yourself for someone, for love of them, and they didn’t notice, what your heart heard was: ‘I do not love you enough to realize when you are changing yourself because I did not love you enough to really see who you were in the first place.”

The smile slipped from the edges of his lips, dropped out of his eyes.  She watched his face tighten, watched his jaw firm and knew he was going to argue the point with her.  Who told someone that their mother hadn’t loved them enough to notice when they sacrificed a part of themselves?  Or their father?  Or the dozen or so other people he had loved - and no doubt been loved by - enough to make that decision?

Except in the end, he didn’t argue.  He didn’t even deny it.  He just sat back in his chair and let their joined hands sink to the top of her little table, twisting his wrist a little a the last moment so his hand was underneath.  As if she needed cradling or protecting from her own table’s surface - but she still found the automatic gesture touching.  And liked it better than someone that trapped her hand under theirs.  He inhaled and then exhaled through his nose, noisy, and frowned.  But his eyes drifted back up from whatever distance they’d moved to and looked at her again.

“That’s not necessarily true, you know.  That they didn’t love me enough to notice.  Sometimes personal pain just gets in the way, keeps you from seeing what you should see because you can’t handle it.”

It was surprising, not what she’d expected from him.  Knights dealt a great deal in Justice and Nobility and the Truths that were too hard for most.  She didn’t know what showed on her face but one edge of his mouth crooked, for her, and something like quiet laughter moved into his piebald eyes.

“Mercy’s a Knight thing too.  Empathy.  If you’re doing the Knight thing right.”

It surprised a sound out of her, something that tipped in the back of her throat, quiet and caught off guard and pleased.  Her fingers in his pulled a little bit closer at him at the sensation and his hand moved to let her.

“All right,” she agreed.  “Its not true.”  Because witches dealt in Judgement, one of the reasons they were supposed to be so impartial, and sometimes it was easy to forget the softer edges of that when making pronouncements.  “But its still what your heart hears, even if your mind knows its just their pain clouding the way they look at you.  They need to believe the lie so they do - but it still costs your own heart when they do.  The head might know better but the heart will still feel what it feels.  And yours has been changed often enough for enough people that let you do it without protesting what you were doing that its shattered itself.  You’re dying because too many people have let you lie to them and chosen to believe you when you said you are fine.”

The softness didn’t leave his eyes.  He heard what she said, and she watched the understanding of it sink into and through him.  Watched the way it changed his face, drew some of the strength and color out of it, watched the shadows come back to his eyes and the edges of his mouth and the skin of his fingers - but the softness didn’t leave his eyes.  Or the lines of his mouth.

“All right,” he said finally, on an exhale and that same softness was in his voice, turning the soft, slow roll of it to velvet.  For a long moment he was quiet.  And then his lips twitched and she watched his eyes change, only then, going clear and green as he looked back at her.  He squeezed her hand, gentle, reassuring.  And she realized what he was doing with a shocked horror growing slow and cold through her.

“That’s what I needed to know then.”  He said and his voice was steady and earnest and almost unashamedly kind.  “I know this wasn’t easy and I know you can’t take payment for it.  But I’m grateful.  You gave me the truth and that’s what I needed.”  His hand withdrew and he pushed his chair back, the sound of its legs scraping against her linoleum floor sounding loud to her ears.  “Can I at least wash the dishes for you before I go?  I’m sure you had other things you were planning on doing today and its the least I can do.”

Released her hand rose to cover her mouth, as if she could hold back a sound even though her lips were already closed over it, eyes wide as she looked up at him.  And what did come out, once he’d finished, was a low, shocked:

“Son of a bitch.”

His eyebrows went up and the edge of his mouth twitched upward, for himself though, no longer for her.

“Sorry?”

“Oh no, you do __not__!” Sibil was on her feet like a shot, fire starting to push against the backs of her eyes.  He might be a Knight, and a high level one too if what she’d seen was any indication, but she was a Witch and she was damn good at her job.  It took her exactly one step to close the distance between them and ram her thin finger into the center of his chest.

“You do not, I repeat, __do not__  get to pull that shit on me, mister.  I just sat here at my own table right in front of you and told you what was killing you.  You do not get to pull that on me and pretend I’m not going to notice when you do the exact thing I just said you did.  To me.  As if I wouldn’t notice.  Sit your ass right back down in that chair because I am not letting you die.  And I am really not letting you pull a Noble Death Wound on my account.”

They were so close that they were almost nose to nose by the time she got done, height difference be damned.  No one challenged a Witch, Sibil no less, and didn’t get a face full of fury even if standing on her toes had to happen.  For a very long second they locked eyes -

And then she gave his solid chest another bony poke and he sat down rather abruptly.

She let herself feel smug and didn’t bother hide it even if she did politely sit down in her own chair again, reaching for her cold tea to give her something to do with her hands.  Anger always burned hot and fast with her and she was already starting to feel a little embarrassed she’d let it out.  Not the least bit sorry she had, mind, but embarrassed at the edges all the same.

The Knight seemed to know better than to lie about what he’d been doing or protest at least, refusing to throw fresh kindling onto that fire.  Instead he sat there very quietly for a few minutes, long enough for Jasper to poke his head out from under the couch and then slowly lop over to sit at Sibil’s feet.  Just in case she needed to scratch his head to help her calm down.

“I’m sorry.”

The Knight said it finally, folding both of his worn hands together on the table in front of them, between the tupperware dishes.

“Good,” she sniffed it, reaching down to scratch over Jasper’s head, more because that was what you did when rabbits came over than for any lingering anger.  She did met his eyes steady though, even if she had to angle them over the edge of the table where leaning down to scratch Jasper put her.  “I don’t need your protection.  At least not from yourself.  If I hurt for your pain, that’s my own decision.”

“That’s - going to take some getting used to,” the softness was back in his voice, better than all the earnestness in the world as far as she was concerned and she gently rubbed her fingers along Jasper’s ears and than sat back up.  Jasper stayed put - just in case she decided she wasn’t done and came back for more pets.

“Work on it,” she suggested and the smile kidnapped the edges of his lips again, for her, and he nodded, slow and almost not there.

“Looks like I’m going to need to.”  A beat and then:  “You said you can stop me from dying?”

She met his piebald hazel eyes….

And she liked what she saw in them.  Found herself starting to smile, small and for him, herself.

“I can,” she promised softly.  Standing up and offering her hand.  The warmth of his fingers closed around it.

“I’ll wash, you rinse.  And while we do, I want you to tell me about your sister.  I want you to tell me about her the way you remember her and how she made you feel, all the good and all the hurt.  I want you to tell me about her like her older brother should.  And that’s how we’ll start.”

Knightly Quests weren’t always about going to far off places to find protected and sacred treasures, to fight fire breathing dragons and rescue princesses, to deliver kingdoms from dark magic.  Those were important and Knights would always be needed for them, no matter how modern the age was or how disguised the magic.  And a Witch didn’t always need to send her chosen hero off looking for Phoenix feathers and talking white horses to create her magic spell from.  Sometimes the magic and the Quest could start in a small double wide trailer in the kitchen over lemon soap bubbles and hot water while a disgruntled rabbit fell asleep on a slightly chewed wicker chair.

Everything that matters has to start somewhere.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading this. I don't often post my original fiction but this one - this one just felt too special to keep to myself. I'll admit that duckydrawsart over on tumblr might have inspired me a bit with her plaid clad men for the knight. As for the rest? It's amazing what you find when your mind goes rummaging around inside itself while you're not paying attention. I hope y'all enjoy, whether you're a knight, a witch or just a small sassy bunny yourself. Everyone plays their part and it all has to start somewhere.


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